1. Field
The invention relates to a method and system for reducing the improper disclosure of documents, and in particular the invention relates to an automated method and system for reducing the improper disclosure of medical record documents.
2. Background
It is often required to deliver copies of medical records on behalf of hospitals and healthcare providers to third party requesters. Typically, this can be accomplished by electronically importing the copies of the medical records into a document management system before sending them to the requesting party. To comply with privacy laws, regulations, and expectations, the document management system must ensure that no mis-release of medical records occurs; a mis-release occurs when the medical records sent are for the wrong patient.
Typically, the records can be from one to several thousand pages long. It has been found that the risk of a mis-release may be reduced to an acceptable (and extremely small) probability, such as an Improper Disclosure rate of 0.0000335, by checking a sample of the requested documents for pre-information in a manual document quality control (QC) process.
This release of information (ROI) workflow involves a variety of manual processing steps. An error along the way can lead to records being released to the wrong party. Paper and electronic medical record systems can occasionally contain misfiled documents. Even if the correct patient folder, paper or electronic, is accessed, that folder can contain documents for the wrong patient. In addition, the typical operational processing of patient records, i.e., filing, re-filing, copying, printing, and the like, can create concatenated records of two or more patients.
The Manual Document QC process involves the use of trained staff (hereinafter referred to as a QC'er) that reviews each request before it is delivered to the requesting party during the ROI workflow. The QC'er is presented on a computer screen with the first five and last five pages imported into the ROI system as a sample, along with the patient's First and Last Name, and their Date of Birth (DOB), Medical Record Number (MRN), and Social Security Number (SSN), if available.
The QC'er checks to make sure that the following Patient Demographic Matching Conditions are all true: the patient First and Last Name are present on at least one of the first 5 pages; the patient First and Last Name are present on at least one of the last 5 pages; and at least one of the following elements: DOB, MRN, or SSN; is present somewhere in the total 10 pages (first 5 and last 5).
If these conditions are not met, the request is put on hold, and the records are not delivered until other staff can confirm that the documents are for the correct patient.
While this solution works well for quality of service, it is labor intensive. Thus, there exists the need for a new technology based automated process for improving the efficiency, as well as increasing the sampling size so that a larger sample or all pages can be inspected to even further decrease the risk of a mis-release.